Palestine, BDS, and the battle against US imperialism

The end of calendar year 2014 marks the ten-year anniversary of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the one-year anniversary of the vote by the American Studies Association (ASA) to boycott Israeli universities.1 These events bookend what has become one of the most effective contemporary challenges to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. Especially since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement (BDS) has served as the most sustainable wedge for building both international solidarity against Israel’s long-time role as US “watchdog” in the Middle East and opposition to Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid state.

The success of BDS is most evident in the academic and cultural boycott movement against Israel on university campuses. Since 2013, resolutions to boycott Israeli universities have been passed by the Association of Asian American Studies, the ASA, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Association for Humanist Sociology, and the African Literature Association. Resolutions to divest from Israel have been passed by student senates at five of ten University of California campuses, by student groups at Wesleyan University, by students at York University in Canada, the Irish Student Union in Dublin, Kings College, London, and the London School of Economics. Most recently, more than 500 Middle East scholars and librarians signed a petition calling for academic boycott of Israel.2

The forefronting of the academic boycott on university campuses reflects the emergent anti-imperialist consciousness of a post-Intifada, post-9/11 generation of activists whose understanding of US imperialism has largely been shaped by these events. What Ali Abunimah has called the “war on campus” between pro-Palestinian activists and university administrations committed to defending US and Israeli interests represents one of the sharpest politicizations of academia since the Vietnam War.3 The recent firing of pro-Palestinian Arab American scholar Steven Salaita by the University of Illinois for his public criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza, and the mass campaign on his behalf, is the most apt symbol of that politicization. The unprecedented support for Salaita in the form of 18,000 petition signatures and a wide-scale boycott campaign by 5,000 academics against the University of Illinois are clear indices of the mainstreaming of Palestinian solidarity politics in the United States. The academic boycott movement also represents the first sustained fight back in the academy against more than twenty-five years of Zionist harassment and intimidation of pro-Palestinian scholars.

At the same time, Israel’s latest military assault on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge—which resulted in the loss of 2,200 Palestinian lives and the decimation of the infrastructure of Gaza, but also new expressions of support for Israel from inside both Arab and Western capitalist states—challenges the momentum of the BDS movement. New US alliances with reactionary Middle East states like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates against ISIS constitute a new turn and an expansion of US military intervention in the name of protecting its own and Israel’s interests in the region. In conjunction, these events demand a deepening and sharpening of anti-imperialist analysis and tactics in the BDS movement. The BDS movement also faces the challenge of moving past the university as a primary organizing site. Here, the success of the labor movement in building the BDS campaign against South Africa is most instructive. Prospects for a “South Africa moment” in ending Israeli apartheid—the primary objective of the BDS campaign—depends on constellating responses to each of these challenges into a wider political and social movement.

History and context of the academic and cultural boycott
PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) was launched in 2004 in the West Bank by 170 organizations in Palestinian civil society. PACBI called for a nonviolent boycott and divestment campaign against Israel modeled on general principles of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s. The guiding principles articulated by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC) set three demands on Israel as conditions and objectives of BDS:

Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;

Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.4

Strategically, PACBI sought to internationalize support for Palestinian self-determination after the diminution and corruption of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the concurrent rise of Hamas, both of which fortified Israeli expansion of settlements between the years 1997 and 2001.5 The PLO under Arafat’s leadership collaborated with the United States and Israel in putting a brake on the First Intifada, assisted Israel and the United States in the development of a security apparatus to police Palestinians, and supported the Oslo Accords and the formation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a putative move towards statehood.6 All of these steps set the stage for the neoliberalization of the West Bank, intensified international capitalization of the Occupation, and deepened PA collaboration with Israel.

The Second Intifada of 2000, itself a response to the bankruptcy of PLO and PA rule, barely preceded the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, where a draft statement opposed “movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement, which is based on racial superiority.”7 The conference brought Palestinian activists into dialogue with activists from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. By 2002, Palestine was riven by checkpoints, and construction of the eight hundred kilometer Apartheid Wall had begun. Archbishop Desmond Tutu also reported after his visit to the Occupied Territories that year stark similarities between the Occupation and South African apartheid. These events helped convince Palestinian activists to adopt the South African boycott and divestment strategy.

The specific call for boycott of Israeli universities was a response to their long history of collaboration with the Occupation. For example:

Israeli universities provide the military-intelligence establishment of Israel, as PACBI cofounder Omar Barghouti has noted, with research—“on demography, geography, hydrology and psychology, among other disciplines — that directly benefits the occupation.” Israeli universities also commit acts that contravene international law, such as the construction of campuses or dormitories in the occupied Palestinian territory, as Hebrew University has done.

Israeli universities systematically discriminate against Palestinians. While Palestinians make up 20 percent of the population of Israel, they are less than 10 percent of the university student body, and less than 1 percent of campus staff. According to Uri Jacobi Yeller, “Palestinian applicants are three times as likely to be rejected by Israeli academic institutions than Jewish applicants.” Palestinians are discriminated against in allocation of dormitories, which is based largely on military service. Similarly, most scholarship and grants to Israeli universities are based on service in the Israeli Defense Force.

Israeli universities, like the Technion Institute, produce weaponry that has been used in the killing of more than 1,200 civilians in Lebanon in 2006, Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09, and the recent Operation Protective Edge.

Israeli universities routinely repress dissent against the Occupation. Ilan Pappé was asked by his university president to resign his position at Haifa University after he openly expressed support for the BDS movement. Amir Hetsroni, a professor at Ariel University in the Occupied West Bank, was fired from his position after publishing an article in Haaretz criticizing the occupation.8

The United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) was launched by a small group of academics in 2009 in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. Its primary aim was to expand the number of new academic and cultural boycott resolutions in the United States. The campaign is modeled on the original PACBI call and shares its original three demands. To date, more than 1,200 academics and 370 cultural workers have signed the call for boycott.9 Members of USACBI also played a critical role in passing boycott resolutions in the American Studies Association, Asian American Studies Association, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and Critical Ethnic Studies Association.

USACBI has become the most significant US-based challenge to a longstanding campaign by the US government and its Zionist allies to repress, harass, intimidate, and fire academics who support Palestinian liberation or are critical of Israel. Edward Said for many years faced harassment and accusations of supporting “terrorism” for advocating for Palestinian rights in the academy and for his book Orientalism, a critical history of ethnocentric scholarship on the Asian, Arab, and Islamic worlds. In 2003, University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian was charged by the United States with racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder and accused of being the leader of a “terrorist” group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. His 2005 trial resulted in acquittal on eight counts and a hung jury on nine other counts.10 Finally, in June 2014, all charges against Al-Arian were dropped. In 2007, political scientist Norman Finklestein was denied tenure at DePaul University after a public attack from Zionists like Harvard attorney Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein had published two books critical of the use of the Holocaust by defenders of Israel to legitimate the occupation of Palestine. Also that year visiting film studies professor Terri Ginsberg was refused consideration for a tenure track position after she made comments supportive of Palestinians at a film screening.11

These attacks reflect the deep penetration on US university campuses of anti-Arab organizations and Islamophobic watch groups. After 9/11, the Islamophobic scholar Daniel Pipes set up the website Campus Watch which encouraged students to act as “informants” against professors sympathetic to Islam or critical of Israel. Pipes pressured Congress to hold hearings into National Resource Centers funded by the federal government under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Pipes and allies like Martin Kramer accused the centers of promoting scholarship that was “anti-Israel.” Also in 2002 the David Project was launched as a Zionist advocacy group meant to target professors sympathetic to Palestine or critical of Israel. The David Project conducted an harassment campaign against Columbia University professor Joseph Massad. In 2012, the David Project published the white paper “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” encouraging a new campaign to combat “anti-Israelism,” specifically the goal of the BDS movement to turn Israel into an “international pariah akin to apartheid South Africa.”12 Lastly there is the AMCHA Initiative, a Zionist advocacy group which has targeted California scholars like California State University, Northridge mathematics professor David Klein and San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi. Klein was singled out by AMCHA for opposing a study abroad in Israel program. Abdulhadi was accused by AMCHA of using state funds to meet with “terrorist” organizations when she traveled to Palestine to conduct research.13

USACBI in its watchdog capacity has generated statements of support for Klein, Abdulhadi, and other US academics like Steven Salaita, to be discussed below. USACBI has also coordinated with student activists and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters to build a wider academic and cultural boycott movement. The confluence of faculty and students in the BDS movement is critical to its success. SJP chapters across the United States have become new targets of intimidation by groups like the David Project and AMCHA that had previously focused exclusively on pro-Palestinian faculty. UC Chancellor Mark Yudof formed an “Advisory Council on Campus Climate” in 2012 in response to accusations by Zionist groups that pro-Palestinian groups like SJP were creating a “hostile environment” for Jewish students.

Pro-Palestinian activists have also faced arrest and intimidation. In 2011 the “Irvine 11,” mostly Arab students, were arrested after peacefully protesting the appearance of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, a former Israeli Defense Forces soldier. In 2013 the Northeastern University Students for Justice in Palestine chapter was temporarily suspended for organizing campus protests. They were reinstated only after a sizable public demonstration.14

The rise of SJP chapters across the United States and their general commitment to direct action and challenge of Zionist influence in the academy makes them the most significant political formation on college campuses since the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s. University administrations have in turn made them the central target of rules meant to repress Palestinian voices and defend Zionist interests. At Barnard College, the administration halted a long-time tradition of allowing students to hang banners over a campus archway when SJP activists adorned it with a banner promoting Israeli Apartheid Week reading “Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine.” The removal of the banner made clear that Palestinian students and student advocates for Palestine were subject to a double standard concerning free speech, and that university administrations were willing to cave in to Zionist pressure groups.15

The Steven Salaita case
The recent firing of Arab American faculty member Steven Salaita reflects the mainstreaming of the BDS movement and pro-Palestinian politics on US campuses, while also exposing the new coalescence of Zionist organizations, university administrations, and the state in response to the success of BDS. Salaita is a Palestinian-American scholar and author of six books on indigeneity. In October 2013, he accepted a job offer to work as an associate professor with tenure in the American Indian Studies program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In preparation, Salaita resigned his tenured position at Virginia Tech University. His wife also resigned her university position. On August 1, two weeks before classes were to begin at UIUC, Salaita received an email from University Chancellor Phyllis Wise indicating that she did not expect the UIUC Board of Trustees to approve Salaita’s appointment. In effect, Salaita was fired from a job he never got to start.

Salaita was fired because of Twitter posts he released attacking the Israeli state and military for its massacre in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. Salaita was also actively involved in the American Studies Association boycott resolution campaign last November, and published several articles in support of the boycott in the aftermath of the vote. Pressure to fire Salaita came from a public and back-channel campaign by pro-Israel and conservative donors to UIUC who first brought Salaita’s tweets to the attention of UIUC administrators. On July 21, the Daily Caller, a right-wing online paper, accused Salaita of being “anti-Semitic.” The Simon Weisenthal Center subsequently wrote a letter to UIUC President Robert Easter likewise accusing Salaita of being anti-Semitic and arguing that Jewish students on campus might feel threatened by him. Steven N. Miller, a UIUC alumnus, threatened to withhold financial gifts to the university if Salaita were hired.16 Chancellor Wise agreed to rearrange her schedule to meet with a donor in Chicago concerned about Salaita’s appointment. Wise herself is on the board of governors of Nike Corporation, one of whose suppliers is Delta Galil Industries, a textile manufacturer that operates in an illegal West Bank settlement.17

On August 22, Wise issued a public letter explaining her decision to fire Salaita.18 In it, she wrote of Salaita’s tweets, “What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” The UIUC Board of Trustees issued a statement of support of the Chancellor the same day.

UIUC’s firing of Salaita ignored a public petition signed by more than 18,000 people calling for his reinstatement. It rejected a boycott campaign against UIUC signed by more than 5,000 scholars who vowed not to speak at the campus until Salaita was hired. It neglected an American Association of University Professors letter demanding Salaita’s reinstatement on the basis of violation of his First Amendment rights, academic freedom, and right to due process. UIUC also received letters from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the USACBI, professional academic organizations like the Modern Language Association, and Jewish faculty and students on campus like Michael Rothenberg, head of the Holocaust Studies Institute; all of whom demanded Salaita’s reinstatement and rejected allegations that Salaita’s tweets were anti-Semitic.

Several lessons may be drawn from the Salaita case in relation to the larger campus movement against Israeli apartheid. First, his firing exposes the structural and ideological complicity between university campus administrations and state support for Israel. Phyllis Wise was one of more than 250 university presidents and chancellors who opposed the ASA vote to boycott Israeli universities last December. The rejection was a reminder that university chancellors and boards of trustees at state universities like those at UIUC are typically appointed by state governors and receive funding from state legislatures, all of which act as watchdogs for US interests in Israel. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, for example, who appointed eight of the eleven UIUC Board of Trustees, is a strong ally of Israel and Zionist groups in Chicago. Two members of the Illinois State Senate, Peter Roskam and Dan Lipinksi, sponsored federal legislation seeking to withdraw state support from academics who engage in the boycott.19 Ira Silverstein, a Chicago Democrat, introduced separate legislation in the Illinois Senate seeking to do the same.20 In firing Salaita, an open advocate for the academic boycott, UIUC leadership acted in loco parentis for Zionist interests at the state level.

Second, the unprecedented national and international solidarity campaign for Salaita represents a watershed moment of political consciousness in the United States around Palestinian solidarity. The campaign was itself built by organizing entities like USACBI and Palestine Solidarity Legal Support that have emerged directly in response to the 2004 call for international solidarity with the Palestinians. Letters and statements of support by professional academic organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the ASA reflect the radicalization of these groups around Palestine since the beginning of the academic boycott movement. The January 2014 MLA meeting, for example, produced a positive vote by the delegate assembly of that organization to condemn Israel’s restrictions on scholars seeking to travel in Gaza.21 The Salaita case also drew sympathetic coverage from mainstream media outlets like the Los Angeles Times and Inside Higher Education, reflective of a general media mainstreaming of a pro-Palestinian perspective in the United States.22

Third, and most important, the Salaita firing has generated a renewed discussion of worker’s rights and the role of labor organizations in campaigns against Israeli apartheid and in support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. The Association of American University Professors (AAUP) letter to UIUC rejected Salaita’s firing as a violation of due process and demanded that the university pay him while his legal case against the university (ongoing) is resolved. The Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) at UIUC released a strong statement in support of Salaita. The first group at University of Illinois to defend Salaita publically was the University of Illinois Campus Faculty Association, a minority union. A September 11 rally on behalf of Salaita and campus workers was jointly sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association and the American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6546, representing recently certified non-tenure-track faculty who had been hit with a wage freeze by the same administration that had just fired Salaita. Campus American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) workers and members of UIUC GEO kicked off the rally by pointing out how an injury to Salaita was an injury to all campus workers. The rally was also used as a launching point by representatives from UIUC Campus Faculty Association for a new campaign to organize full-time faculty to make sure that the Salaita firing was not repeated.23

The UIUC rally points to an important way forward for the BDS movement. Connecting labor struggles to academic and cultural boycotts can “mainstream” the fightback against campus administrations whose neoliberal strategy of top-down privatization, anti-union policies, and profiteering often intersect with defense of Zionist interests, protection of pro-Israel donors, and the political interdependency of university boards of trustees with the elected political masters who appoint them. Such a strategy would begin to take the best of the South African BDS campaign and put it to new use. The Coalition of South African Trade Unions helped convince members of the Bay Area International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in 1984 to refuse to offload cargo intended for Israel. The ongoing anti-Israeli apartheid campaigns by United Autoworkers-affiliated graduate student employees unions within the University of California system indicates that such labor anti-apartheid militancy can spread across US campuses.

The recent successful coordination between students and community activists and the ILWU to “Block the Boat” in Oakland, refusing to offload Israeli cargo, is another example; other examples include successful protests against Veolia, the transport company which operates segregated bus systems in Occupied Palestine. Veolia’s apartheid profiteering became part of a public campaign by activists when the company was hired to represent the Bay Area Rapid Transit System in negotiations with unionized workers. Still other examples of recent BDS/labor solidarity include statements of support for fired Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita by the Texas State Employees Union, and resolutions passed by the British National Trade Union and the Canadian Union of Public Employees to support boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. In short, a revitalized labor movement conjoined to an already mobilized BDS campaign can create critical new solidarities in the “war on campus,” in the workplace, and on the streets.24

BDS and the new imperial Mideast war
In mid-September 2014, the United States began a new bombing campaign in the Middle East, targeting ISIS and the “Khorasan Group,” described by the Obama administration as a terrorist cell operating in Syria. The new war is being staged in part as a defense of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu has already compared ISIS to Hamas. Israel began itinerant bombing against ISIS this summer. On September 16, Newsweek magazine published an article titled “ISIS is Merely the Latest Threat to the Jewish State.”25

The BDS and pro-Palestinian movement must speak directly to this new challenge. ISIS is the fundamentalist monster unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which created the power vacuum ISIS presumes to fill. That invasion was merely the latest in a series of US wars in the Middle East dating to the 1990s, meant to secure its oil interests in the region and to buffer its proxy, Israel. In its attack on ISIS, the United States has allied itself with five Arab states in an attempt to consolidate its hold on the Middle East. At the same time, it has offered to train Syrian rebels against ISIS, forging an alliance with one-time Hamas supporter Bashar Al-Assad of Syria. Assad is the butcher of the ongoing Syrian revolution against a corrupt, anti-democratic regime. Pro-Palestinian activists must argue that opposing Assad is as important as opposing Israel in advancing chances for Palestinian liberation. Meanwhile, Egypt and its counterrevolutionary leader President Sisi is committed to helping to smash Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood it seeks to punish at home.

The forces of counterrevolution—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States—are fully aware of the connection between Palestinian liberation and the Arab Spring; the Egyptian revolution at its inception included support for Palestinian self-determination.26 The BDS movement must recognize that the Arab working class of the Middle East remains its most important ally in the region. As Sameh Naguib of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists has argued, the liberation of Palestine depends upon a sustained alliance between working classes from Cairo to Ramallah against Arab capitalist states, the US, and Israel.27 Indeed, the original call to boycott Israel by the Palestinian National Committee in 2004 was endorsed by every major trade union in Palestine, including the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition. The campaign was meant to lift the yoke of Israel’s masters while linking arms with workers struggles across the world. This spirit animated the solidarity we saw in 2011 when from Athens to Wisconsin workers chanted “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine.”

To further advance its own place in these broader struggles, and to advance these struggles themselves, the BDS movement must continue to underscore its anti-imperialist and antiwar roots. The 2004 PACBI call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions codified demands for Palestinian self-determination that brought thousands of Palestinians into the streets in the First Intifada of 1987-1993 and the Second Intifada of 2000. Since 2005, the BDS campaign has singularly kept alive a spirit of anticolonial, anti-imperialist resistance in the Middle East in the face of the abandonment of Arab nationalism as a project of liberation, and the enfolding of much of the Arab world economy into neoliberalism. The international marches against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge this past summer were organized by many of the same people inspired by these events and their memories: more than 100,000 in London, and massive marches in Tunisia, Madrid, Dublin, New York, and Chicago. These global demonstrations are the coordinates of a new global anti-imperialist network. They resurrected for the first time since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq the spirit of an antiwar movement that has since dissipated. Thus, by relentlessly focusing on Israel and Washington’s role in the new war against ISIS and in the Middle East counterrevolutions, BDS can help to build a movement to combat neoliberal capital, Zionism, US expansion, and Islamophobia. Such a campaign will by necessity require an extension of BDS from campuses into workplaces, from workplaces to unions, from unions to community halls, from community halls into homes. We can build a still-stronger BDS movement beginning in the name of Palestinian freedom and ending in a permanent blow against American empire.